by
Sally Rooney
inspo/interiority
Sally Rooney,
Frank Conroy,
David Foster Wallace,
Ursula K. Le Guin,
Vladimir Nabokov,
Mary Karr,
Rachel Kushner,
Kenneth Cain,
Jane Tompkins
not descriptions of the physical world but of whatever is going on in the writer's mind
Instead of thinking gigantic thoughts, I tried to focus on something small, the smallest thing I could think of. Someone once made this pew I'm sitting on, I thought. Someone sanded the wood and varnished it. Someone carried it into the church. Someone laid the tiles on the floor, someone fitted the windows. Each brick was placed by human hands, each hinge fitted on each door, every road surface outside, every bulb in every streetlight. And even things built by machines were really built by beings, who built the machines initially. And human beings themselves, made by other humans, struggling to create happy children and families. Me, all the clothing I wear, all the language I know. Who put me in this church, thinking these thoughts? Other people, some I know very well and others I have never met. Am I myself, or am I them? Is this me, Frances? No, it is not me. It is the others. Do I sometimes hurt and harm myself, do I abuse the unearned cultural privilege of whiteness, do I take the labor of others for granted, have I sometimes exploited a reductive iteration of gender theory to avoid serious moral engagement, do I have a troubled relationship with my body, yes. Do I want to be free of pain and therefore demand that others also live free of pain, the pain that is mine and therefore also theirs, yes, yes.
When I opened my eyes I felt that I had understood something, and the cells of my body seemed to light up like millions of glowing points of contact, and I was aware of something profound. Then I stood up from my seat and collapsed.
labour theory of value lol
reminds me of some of the more thoughtful commentaries on the notre dame burning - sure you can rejoice in its burning as a symbol of colonialism, but also, who made the church? the french proletariat. and all are now dead
I got up from the bench. It was too cold to sit outside. I wanted to be warm again. Lit from below, empty branches scratched at the sky.
I didn't think it had to be, I said.
You know, you're saying that, but you obviously weren't happy that I loved someone else. It's okay, it doesn't make a bad person.
But I loved someone else.
Yeah, I know, he said. But you didn't want me to.
I wouldn't have minded, if ...
I tried to think of a way to finish this sentence without saying: if I were different, if I were the person I wanted to be. Instead I just let it fall off into silence. I was so cold.
I closed my eyes. Things and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn't know about and never would. A complex network of objects and concepts. You live through certain things before you understand them. You can't always take the analytical position.
Noi came in, just pausing in the open doorway — my God, she hadn’t even shut the door while changing her shirt! She looked at him and saw herself. The old woman.
You could brush your hair and change your shirt, or you could wear last week’s shirt and last night’s braids, or you could put on cloth of gold and dust your shaven scalp with diamond powder. None of it would make the slightest difference. The old woman would look a little less, or a little more, grotesque.
One keeps oneself neat out of mere decency mere sanity, awareness of other people.
And finally even that goes, and one dribbles unashamed.
[...] She had nothing of him at all except his name written on the folder. She hadn’t kept his letters, it was sentimental to keep letters. Besides, she never kept anything. She couldn’t think of anything that she had ever owned for more than a few years, except this ramshackle old body, of course, and she was stuck with that...
Dualizing again. “She” and “it.” Age and illness made one dualist, made one escapist; the mind insisted, It’s not me, it’s not me. But it was. Maybe the mystics could detach mind from body, she had always rather wistfully envied them the chance, without hope of emulating them. Escape had never been her game. She had sought for freedom here, now, body and soul.
To look at oneself and find it hideous, what a job! But then, when she hadn’t been hideous, had she sat around and stared at herself like this? Not much! A proper body’s not an object, not an implement, not a belonging to be admired, it’s just you, yourself. Only when it’s no longer you. but yours, a thing owned, do you worry about it — Is it in good shape? Will it do? Will it last?
aaaaahhh
On the morning following his arrival, I did everything I could to get out of the house for my morning hike without his knowing where I had gone. Breakfastless, with hysterical haste, I gathered my net, pill boxes, killing jar, and escaped through the window. Once in the forest, I was safe; but still I walked on, my calves quaking, my eyes full of scalding tears, the whole of me twitching with shame and self-disgust, as I visualized my poor friend, with his long pale face and black tie, moping in the hot garden—patting the panting dogs for want of something better to do, and trying hard to justify my absence to himself.
amazing
In my foolish innocence, I believed that what I had written was a beautiful and wonderful thing. As I carried it homeward, still unwritten, but so complete that even its punctuation marks were impressed on my brain like a pillow crease on a sleeper’s flesh, I did not doubt that my mother would greet my achievement with glad tears of pride. The possibility of her being much too engrossed, that particular night, in other events to listen to verse did not enter my mind at all. Never in my life had I craved more for her praise. Never had I been more vulnerable. My nerves were on edge because of the darkness of the earth, which I had not noticed muffling itself up, and the nakedness of the firmament, the disrobing of which I had not noticed either. Overhead, between the formless trees bordering my dissolving path, the night sky was pale with stars. In those years, that marvelous mess of constellations, nebulae, interstellar gaps and all the rest of the awesome show provoked in me an indescribable sense of nausea, of utter panic, as if I were hanging from earth upside down on the brink of infinite space, with terrestrial gravity still holding me by the heels but about to release me any moment.
[...] the sense of leaving Russia was totally eclipsed by the agonizing thought that Reds or no Reds, letters from Tamara would be still coming, miraculously and needlessly, to southern Crimea, and would search there for a fugitive addressee, and weakly flap about like bewildered butterflies set loose in an alien zone, at the wrong altitude, among an unfamiliar flora.
crying
My wife moved toward the house, picking her way through the wet, shaggy grass in her high heels. She opened the front door and went inside. I could see her moving behind the lighted windows, and something came to me then. I might never see her again. That's what crossed my mind, and it staggered me.